Problems with Assignments in Firefox 3

Several of you reported that you received errors when uploading assignments to Bb.  It appears to be an issue with Bb and Firefox 3.0 not getting along well.

Here is some info from Tech Support...

Good morning, Prof. Williams.

I subscribe to the Bb support listservs (a community of Bb admins at universities).  It seems like there is a known issue with Firefox 3 and Blackboard (7.2, 7.3, 8.0) regarding Assignment uploads.  Firefox 2 works fine, but Firefox 3 has an issue.

Apparently, Firefox 3 does not add the correct path when you "browse" to a file to upload in the Assignment tool.

Example listed in the listserv:
Firefox 2.0: this.LocalFile.value() = "C:\\Documents and Settings\\user\\Desktop\\stack.txt"
Firefox 3.0: this.LocalFile.value() = "stack.txt"

According to some of the respondents in the listserv, Bb has a temporary "patch" that will resolve the error.  We're asking Blackboard to schedule this patch on our test server so we can test and confirm that the problem has been resolved.

In the meantime, there are two possible actions that Firefox 3 users can take:

OPTION 1: INSTALL A USER AGENT ADD-IN

** A third-party add-in. Use at own risk. **

http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

When installed, select the Internet Explorer user agent before clicking "Assignments" and before attempting an upload.  I have not personally tested this, but folks in the listserv suggested this as a workaround.

OPTION 2: USE IE or UNINSTALL FF3 and REINSTALL FIREFOX 2

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

(There is another technical option that involves manually adding a user agent string in Firefox' config file, but that would likely be too complex for the average user.)

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I hope some of the above information is helpful in the meantime.

We'll continue to research the issue and work with Blackboard to resolve.

Sincerely,
Alan Regan, MFA
Technology and Learning
Information Technology
Pepperdine University
(310) 506-6756